Spot The Difference!

This week there's a Spot The Difference competition...

From this:

To this:

You can't count the mist or the extra scaffolding...

Answer: There's an extra window at the front of the house, no lintels over the old windows and some very lovely student digs style hessian curtains. It's just gorgeous. Each time we think there can't be anything else to knock out, more stone and brick heads down to the garden.

Ah, the garden. Hmmm...

As you can see we now have a sea of mud plus earth mountains on the far side. The idea is that all the topsoil is scraped off, the subsoil from elsewhere is put down, the topsoil is put back and it all looks the same as it did before but about a foot higher. We will be buying agricultural quantities of grass seed before very long...

The orange has now all gone from the house (hooray) and we've spoken to the paint people about how to repair the stone and repaint. Not yet though.

And we are doing some rebuilding (yay). The back roof of the house was in two parts, and now the side wall is being rebuilt to make one roof at the back. 

There isn't really a red line on the roof - that's just my Helpful Way Of Explaining.

So here is the new roofline:

Also covered in lovely hessian. We have a lot of hessian. It's a good job the side walls are being done now - the new roof arrives A WEEK TOMORROW!! We are ridiculously excited, and it's come round really quickly...

So what else this week? A new low wall around the patio (currently another mud bath) was started on the far side of the extension slab.

And we welcomed our first tenant into the barn. We left some fig rolls out. On Saturday morning one of the fig rolls was out on the wood shelf, so we moved it and put it out for the birds. On Sunday morning there was another fig roll in exactly the same place. Obviously some poor little mouse had spent Friday night hauling a huge fig roll out of the packet and having a nibble on the edges. 

Can you imagine his shock and horror when he found it had gone and had to start again? Bless him... we let him have the second one and the rest of the packet. We bought the builders new biscuits and a secure tub to put them in...

Sarah's Occasional Tip Of The Week: if you have Velcro on your jacket cuffs, don't wipe your dripping nose on your sleeve. It's like sandpaper. Just saying.

Purchases of the week:

30 red bricks from Gallops Salvage Yard near Crickhowell. Our new favourite place. The bricks are for reveals around the new front window. It's going to be painted, but it's BOB's attention to detail that means it will look the same as the other windows when it's painted.

6 spotlights. We would have bought 8 but Homebase, bless 'em, limit their stock to 3 per store so we've already done two visits.

Hammerite paint - in a yuk shade of beige. There was a very interesting wall plaque in the outside wall which has now been cleaned up and removed. Our plan is to repaint it and put it into the new chimney.

It will be painted in a yuk shade of beige then we'll paint it a more interesting colour. Ooh, what to use? Altogether now.... 

RONSEAL WILLOW!!!